One interesting thing that happened while I was in Cannes last month at 3GSM was the frequency that I would hear the default Nokia ringtone song.  Particularly when attending press conferences of some rival equipment vendors (such as Ericsson or Siemens).  It seemed that the standard Nokia tune kept getting played and disturbing some of these events (one fellow even joked that Nokia always had someone planted in the audience with a cell phone, but it could have been just a coincidence, as attendees often forget to mute their cell phones and put them on vibrate mode).

Well, one Finnish colleague told me that the song is nothing more than just a piece by Jean Sibelius (the Finnish composer shown on the photo, who authored a piece called Finlandia, which later became the country's national anthem) simply played backwards.  I was a bit puzzled, since I never heard the story.

As it turns out, he was pulling my leg.  I did a bit of digging and found out that in fact, the tune comes from a classical guitar work called Gran Vals, which was composed by Francisco Tarrega in the 19th century.  I was also able to discover a good article detailing the history of ringtones.